Euclid's Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace

This question and others about space and time grew out of simple observations of the environment by a select group of thinkers whose lives and brains Mlodinow dissects. Starting with Euclid, geometry has flowed out over the centuries, describing the universe, and, Mlodinow argues, making modern civilization possible. Each story builds satisfactorily on the last, until at the end of this delightful book, one has a sense of having climbed a peak of understanding. --Adam Fisher. Lots of examples pepper th

Don't Be Fooled - This Is More History of Modern Physics than Geometry This book purports to tell "the story of geometry from parallel lines to hyperspace." The first half starts to do exactly that. Then Mlodinow seems to get bored with geometry. Starting with the chapter on Einstein, he switches over to physics. While the history of modern physics may be interesting, it has been told many times, and was not what this book was supposed to be about. He is a f. amacust said Very Good Book With An Excellent Epilogue. This is a very good book, much better than I expected. I thought it would be more like a college mathematics text book. Instead it is more like a novel. It is very readable and the subjects flow smoothly from one to another. I found the reading enjoyable and it kept my interest from one chapter to the next. Most of it is not too technical or abstract so it should be understandable to the . Great back stories Don Anderson Having taught University Chemistry for many years, this book was great because it gave the back story on the lives of many of the physics/chemistry theory discoverers.Favorite quote: "This question was settled for good in 1931 by the shocking theorem of Kurt Gādel: he proved that in a system of sufficient complexity, such as the theory of numbers, there must exist a statement that cann

Finally in the fourteenth century an obscure bishop in France invented the graph and heralded the next revolution: the marriage of geometry and number. That modest idea was the basis of scientific civilization. Through Euclid's Window Leonard Mlodinow brilliantly and delightfully leads us on a journey through five revolutions in geometry, from the Greek concept of parallel lines to the latest notions of hyperspace. It is a thrilling math of extra, twisted dimensions, in which space and time, matter and energy, are all intertwined and revealed as consequences of a deep, underlying structure of the universe. At Caltech, Princeton, and universities around the world, scientists are recognizing that all the varied and wondrous forces of nature can be understood through geometry -- a weird new geometry. Today we are in the midst of a new revolution. Based on Mlodinow's extensive historical research; his studies alongside colleagues such as Richard Feynman and Kip Thorne; and interviews with leading physicists and mathematicians such as Murray Gell-Mann, Edward Witten, and Brian Greene, Euclid's Window is an extraordinary blend of rigorous, authoritative investigation and accessible, good-humored storytelling that makes a stunningly original argument asserting the primacy of geometry. But further advance was halted when the Western mind nodded off into the Dark Ages. Then, while intrepid mariners were sailing back and forth across the Atlantic to the New World,